


Girl's Night Out

by Fallynleaf



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Pre-Femslash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-06
Updated: 2014-12-06
Packaged: 2018-02-28 08:17:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2725373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fallynleaf/pseuds/Fallynleaf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Somehow, even after everything, Donna's still an optimist. Jody isn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Girl's Night Out

**Author's Note:**

> So I watched 10.08 "Hibbing 911" and pretty much immediately found my Supernatural femslash OTP. I love Jody and Donna's whole dynamic, and I'm really, really glad we finally got a female bonding episode of Supernatural, even though it took us ten seasons to get there.
> 
> I've pretty much spent the past couple days repeatedly refreshing the "Donna Hanscum/Jody Mills" tag on AO3 eagerly awaiting more fic. And then I decided that even though I'd rather be reading someone else's long, plotty Donna/Jody fic, what I'm looking for doesn't quite exist yet, so I might as well write something and contribute to the tag myself.
> 
> This was supposed to turn out a lot shippier than it did, but I guess my brain decided that Jody and Donna still needed more build-up before they could start to get to a point where they could be a romantic couple, so in some ways, that's what this fic is.

As a rule, Jody didn't let herself get drunk. She imbibed alcohol, certainly. A beer every now and then. Something a little harder maybe once a season. But she'd lived in the same town as Bobby Singer for far too many years, and she'd known him as an old drunk long before she'd known him as a hunter. And she'd known him well enough to know that the two aspects of his personality were connected.

Every hunter had his vice. Every single one of them had something to blur the passing of time until you forget the smear of blood and the eyes of someone you loved staring up at you blank and empty like the glass in your hand. Jody knows the narrative. She doesn't know if anyone ever told it to her straight like that, but she knows it just the same.

And she knew that she wasn't going to let it happen to her. She'd already lost her son once, then twice. She'd lost her husband, too. Had seen her son bent over her husband's dead body, blood smeared all over his mouth, and then Sam had shot him.

Jody had spent four years not letting herself forget that image.

And then instead of getting a vice, she'd got herself a daughter. But really, the two things were not that different. Both of them were attempts to fill some sort of void that was cut right out of the middle of her.

But Jody doesn't let herself get drunk. And she has a daughter, now, a reason to keep it all together, and that's what she tells herself sometimes, when all of the world's darkness is clustering around her and howling outside her door.

"Hey," Donna said, one day in a long line of days, "Y'know what we should do?"

"What?" Jody asked.

"We should go out and order a bunch of girly drinks, then go back to my hotel room and watch cheesy rom-coms while tipsy," Donna said, smiling. "It'll be fun! A night out with just us girls! We haven't had one of those yet!"

_No_ , Jody thought. _We just killed some monsters and pulled you into a world of horror and blood that you'll never be able to leave._ "I don't know, Donna," Jody sighed. "I'm not sure I'm up for it."

"Come on!" Donna prompted. "We just took out some bad guys! That deserves a celebration. I'll even make it my treat."

And sometime after that, Jody found herself seated at a bar, staring down a violently pink liquid in a funky shaped glass. It didn't even taste that bad, just a little oversweet, maybe, but Jody's mind was starting to blur at the edges a little, and a numbness was setting into her, and in a bit of a panic, she forced herself to hang on to just enough sobriety that she didn't start to take comfort in it.

"Wow," Donna was saying, her voice a little higher than usual, a little more giggle in it. "And you take out monsters like that all the time?!"

"Not all the time," Jody said. "Just sometimes."

"Wow," Donna said again. She was probably at least half a drink ahead of Jody. "You're so... strong and _calm_ about everything."

"Hey, you're the one who saved _me_ , remember?" Jody said. "You're pretty strong, yourself." She paused, surveying Donna through the warm haze that had fallen over them both. "And calm. How are you so calm about this?" Jody asked.

"I mean, I totally freaked out about it," Donna said. "Because it's kind of freaky, monsters being real and all. Makes me think about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. And Leprechauns." She started to giggle.

"Not real, and not real, and _hell if I know_ ," Jody answered. "I don't really know a whole lot. Sam and Dean know more. Bobby knew the most." Her voice got softer, a little choked. "Didn't know enough, though. It's never enough." She curled her fingers around the glass. The little cherry floating in her drink bobbed like a bright spot of blood.

"Hey," Donna said, reaching across the table and placing her hand on top of Jody's. She patted Jody's hand a couple times in solace. "You and me, we were enough with the vamps, right? That counts for something. It counts for _a lot_ of somethings."

Jody tried to smile, but it was hard. Figures that after everything, she'd become the maudlin kind of drunk. Not that she was even close to drunk yet. But all of this‒ this was why she didn't get drunk. Because then she was going to end up old and cranky and living out of the bottle, still stuck on that image of her dead husband and her dead son.

"Nope," Donna said. "Not going to happen." And that's when Jody realized that she'd been saying everything out loud. Laying out all of her stupid fears onto the table and onto the shoulders of this woman who didn't deserve them.

"Because you've got Alex, and you've got me," Donna said, like that was the only argument she needed. "And after we finish our drinks, we're going to go back and cry over fake people 'cause it's so sad when they turn out happy." She smiled, and her grin was so bright in the dimly lit bar, Jody almost had to look away.

They ended up watching some movie where a man and a woman eventually fell in love, but had to overcome some obstacles before they actually got together, and the film was a conglomeration of every cliché that Jody had ever seen, and she would wake up the next morning and not be able to remember the film's title or the names of any of the characters, but Donna ended up sobbing into her shoulder part of the way through it, so Jody mainly just wrapped her arm around Donna and held her tight.

It was nice, having a warm body to hold onto. It had been a very long time since Jody had had that. With the alcohol sitting too-warm in her stomach, she couldn't even remember when the last time had been. Maybe it had been her husband.

Jody didn't cry when she thought of him, even while on the drunker side of tipsy, and that might be the hardest thought, the idea that some part of her heart had already hardened enough that she could somehow be okay even while he wasn't.

"Isn't this fun?" Donna asked, sniffling, as she removed her head from Jody's shoulder. Donna's face was red and blotchy and streaked with tears, but she wore a trembling smile, and the tears were already drying.

Jody didn't answer. She watched the credits of the movie scroll past, feeling disconnected from everything around her.

"Hey," Donna said softly. She reached out and grasped Jody's arms, turning her so that they were facing each other. "Are you okay?"

"No," Jody said. Her voice caught. She couldn't keep staring at the concern in Donna's expression, so she closed her eyes and tried to think about the movie, or about Alex, or about anything that wasn't monsters and blood and darkness.

Then there was a pair of arms enveloping her, wrapping her all tight and warm, and Donna wasn't saying anything or looking at her anymore, and Jody opened her eyes only to find them filled with tears.

Jody cried for awhile. She cried quietly, the tears kind of falling lifelessly down her cheeks, but maybe that was better than the empty sobbing she'd done after she'd lost both her son and her husband.

The whole time, Donna just held her and ran her fingers through Jody's hair in rhythmic movements.

"How do you do it?" Jody asked, after a very long while. "How do you stay so damn _happy_? I‒ I didn't want to bring you into all this. Didn't want to‒ to take away your _innocence_ or something. It's so much better not having to know."

"Nuh-uh," Donna said. Jody could feel the movement of Donna shaking her head. "If something's sucking out my fat, I'd rather know about it. The only person who gets to care about my fat is _me_."

Jody laughed. It wasn't the happiest laugh or the most genuine, but it was probably a step up from crying. At some point, she pulled away from Donna, and Donna only clung for a couple seconds of delayed reaction time before she let Jody go.

"Thank you," Jody said. It was a broad, blanket expression of gratitude.

"Anytime," Donna said. "Really. Call me anytime. I'll drive out to see you. I don't have many friends." She gave a nervous laugh.

"Yeah, you do," Jody said. "You've got me. And Sam and Dean, though you probably don't want to spent _too_ much time with _them_."

They sat together on the hotel couch, Jody's stomach now more pleasantly warm with alcohol than twisted in sorrow and bitterness. Donna's head was lolled back, her shoulder resting against Jody's.

"You can stay here tonight, if you want," Donna said. "I don't mind. It'd be kind of nice, actually. Like a slumber party."

"I think I'm kind of partied out."

"I was thinking more the 'slumber' part," Donna said. "Sleeping," she clarified needlessly.

"I think I could handle that," Jody said. Her eyelids were already feeling kind of heavy. At some point, Donna tugged her upright and dragged her over to the large hotel bed, and Jody crawled onto it without really thinking about it, letting Donna pull up the covers over both of them.

Jody's last thought before she fell asleep was that maybe if Donna could fight monsters and still be okay, if she could still get invested in trite romantic comedy films, and drink without needing it to become a vice to ward off an encroaching emptiness, then maybe Jody could somehow be okay, too.


End file.
